But for the Feeling
by wee-me
Summary: Character study fluff. Arthur with children around, nothing more than.


**But for the Feeling**

Authoress: Wee-Me

**DISCLAIMER: **I don't own "Inception" or any associated characters; in fact I'm not sure I even understood all of it, so sue me not. Any of the recognizable characters/quotes are not mine.

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Arthur, bless him, is the best with kids. For all that he looks like he just wandered away from a high powered law firm most of the time he's the one that isn't afraid to hug a sticky handed kid or sit in the dirt and play. He's especially good with James and Phillipa. "Ungle Ar", they call him. They follow him around like ducklings or like he's the pied piper. There are dozens of pictures of them all in a line around Dom's house, Mal started it and Dom keeps the tradition.

"When isn't Arthur disgustingly competent?" is all Eames says about it when anyone acts surprised. He's much less caustic in his comments when there's a small child drooling on Arthur's shoulder. Usually he just tries to sneak a picture. It's a measure of how relaxed he is that Arthur doesn't make him eat his phone when he does snap them. (He just steals them back later and finds a way to make Eames pay for it on their next job.)

By all rights Eames should be the one the kids like most. He's almost never dressed up and he doesn't enforce the rules all that often. He's most likely to bribe them with cookies too. But no, if there's a kid around they'll toddle off to find the point man. Dom thinks it's something about the way he looks at them, like they're people and not some species of subhuman. Having Arthur smile and give you his full attention is a pretty good feeling even if you aren't in the under 10 set.

Ariadne thinks that his attempts at child friendly clothing are hilarious. "You look like a math professor," she tells him. It's always some sort of slacks and a funny tie, or dark jeans and sweater vest if he's really relaxed. He should be explaining physics to college students, not feeding mac and cheese to a four year old. But there he is, listening to a disjointed ramble about My Little Pony and sneaking in bites of food when he can. He's better at it than her. Her child-care experience ended with a few babysitting jobs in high school and she's never looked back.

He's a doting uncle, always willing to step up. He's braved a women's rest room at the museum for Phillipa and had more tea parties than anyone should have to endure. Eames still has a picture of him in a tiara because of it. He's had runny noses wiped on shirts that cost hundreds, little hand prints on the sleeves and on the legs of the corresponding pants. He calmly stripped down to his undershirt once when James threw up on him, like it wasn't a big deal at all. Even Dom had been grossed out.

When Dom breaks his foot on a job the October after he gets home Arthur is the one that steps up to help with trick-or-treating. Dom still goes, but he's there more to get it on film than to keep up with the kids. He and his boot cast clomp along a few feet behind them. Arthur does look like a math teacher, outfit all black with a jack-o'-lantern covered tie as his concession to the holiday. A math teacher that could walk a runway, but still. He patiently walks them house to house and makes the appropriate noises over costumes and candy haul. "Adorable," Dom will say later, just not anywhere where his friend can hear it.

Arthur never explains. He's infuriatingly quiet on the subject of how he can manage to shoot a man and turn around to comfort a crying child. (That particular scenario played out once, the whole group surprised at how fast their man reacted. It was apparent that trying to harm a child in front of Arthur was a Very Bad Thing to do and would end in pain. Even if, or perhaps especially if, the child you harmed was your own. Arthur had carried that boy away from his dead father and still the kid liked him best.) It's one of his great mysteries, like how his suits stay so clean in fights and what his real last name is. His smile says he's more than happy to keep it to himself as he opens a juice box and goes back to Seuss.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: The idea of Arthur with kids hanging all over him was too good to pass up. Just a snippet of character study I decided not to mess with any further. Thanks for reading, please review.

Title is from this quote "Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them." by Richard L. Evans.

Part of my 2011 13 Posts/Days of Halloween.


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